Site menu:

The number of Britons who are actually suffering from repetitive strain injury (RSI) is far smaller than estimates suggest, experts have said.

Just one in three people who claim to suffer from RSI actually have genuine symptoms, a study by researchers at the University of Southampton's epidemiology research centre has found.

Scientists questioned 5,000 workplace injury patients about their health and jobs, including the physical nature of their job, the state of their mental and physical health, and whether they believed they were suffering from RSI.

Their analysis revealed that 46 per cent had suffered from arm pain during the previous 12 months, while 54 per cent blamed their job for either causing or aggravating their symptoms.

However, researchers claim that just 14 per cent of arm pain is due to arm-straining activities, suggesting that the contribution of RSI towards workplace injuries has been greatly exaggerated.

Writing in the British Medical Journal publication Occupational and Environmental Medicine, they note: 'Statistics from Labour Force Surveys are widely quoted as evidence for the scale of occupational illness.

'However, their validity as a measure of the burden of disease caused by work is questionable.'